Tag Archives: Academia

Ph.D. course: Technology and the Public Sphere

26 June 2006

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Some of my favourite professors(?) at my department are running a Ph.D. course on Technology and the Public Sphere.

“The relationship between media technologies and the public sphere is increasingly important. We will explore it theoretically and empirically during four days of intense academic activity”

They’re focusing on John Dewey, Marshall McLuhan and everyone’s beloved Jürgen Habermas and “a range of articles from contemporary writers will also be discussed, among them James Carey, Chantal Mouffe and Graham Murdock.

And my personal joy: Brian Winston and Andrew Feenberg are coming!!!

It looks great! And I really wish that I could participate – huh…would be kinda cool to try, actually! Who do I have to persuade, I wonder?

Anyways! I really recommend it! So if you’re looking for an intense Ph.d. course – go for it!

Yay! Henry Jenkins is blogging!

24 June 2006

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What joy!!! Definitely a welcome presence!

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and just a MUST READ!

I’ve just read his post “Fun vs. Engagement: The Case of the Great Zoombinis” where I was introduced to Scott Osterweil’s at The Education Arcade and his captivating podcast.

It’s so good to see discussions and research about learning and games beyond ‘just’ simulations. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for simulation games, but I do believe there is a clearer learning power in actual gameplay. And ofcourse this has been a topic for a long time – I guess I just understand the language so much better!

“What we did when we started designing Zoobinis was to try to think about our own experience with the mathematics of the game and try to access our own learning of it — trying to remember what it was like to encounter the subject in school or thinking about how we’d use the subject in our daily lives and try to identify times when we had been playful with the concepts in the past. In fact, most of us when we are trying to master something we find ways to be playful to it and in accessing our own playful approach to the material what we were really doing was finding the game that was inherent in the mathematics. Instead of putting math in the game, we tried to find the game in the math” – Osterweil

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Player vs. user

10 May 2006

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Before I design some lethal weapon to kill the bird that’s franticly chirping outside my window telling me that I’m still nowhere and it’s morning – I thought I might vent out a bit in here!

Last year I had an incredibly difficult time discussing narrative with my fellow students in Games and Game Culture! They just refused to discuss with me the meaning behind the aesthetics of the worlds we were playing in. I remember someone, slightly frustrated with me, explaining to me that narrative is something that has happened. You can’t be playing narrative because narrative is story telling and you’re not telling a story. When I then (stubborn as I sometimes can be) emphasised that the whole geography we were in (Prince of Persia at the time) was basically telling us something, they usually sighed and gave me a whole song and dance that it was all code. When I then further persisted in stating that “well the game designer must have had some intention by designing this temple that I just can’t seem to get out of!” – respons: “No, Linn!!! It’s all just obstacle to reach your goal!”.

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Using my blog as a resource

2 May 2006

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I’m not going to be blogging much this month as it is serious crunch time (urgh…who am I kidding? The summer’s gonna disappear into this thing!) I keep encountering problems! Such as I’ve eagerly avoided anything to do with story, narrative and fiction in games – specially MMORPGs. I’ve enjoyed reading about it and discussing the topic, but I’ve avoided having to dig deep into it – I’ve only skimmed the surface. But I keep coming back to the notion that MMORPG players are co-authors in the games they play! The fiction is the law – geography and rules. And well, I can’t seem to shake it off! So as well as looking at labour theory – I thought I might dip into some narratology (well…at least I’m enjoying it!!!).

But here I am ‘speaking’ my mind again, without thinking through what impression an unknown reader can get from reading this blogpost – so let me stop my trail of thought right there – and come back when I actually know what I’m ‘talking’ about (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha)!

Anyways! I was just going to slap in a little fact about rl killing in China because of a vl theft of a sword in my thesis and I knew I had blogged about it ages ago so I thought I would dig it up and find the link to a ‘true and believable’ source, so I could actually use this little fact! Ofcourse the links were dead! Typical! So what to do?! A lot of digging to find a reliable source, infact and it’s REALLY annoying when you know you’ve already found it once! Really annoying!!!! So I’ve started to wonder…maybe I should bring Dekcuf with me into my thesis! Oh…even better…when I hand it in it will say “By Linn Søvig and Dekcuf” – oh wouldn’t that be great!!! But I’m sure there’s some way I can do this, can’t I? All the stuff I’ve already blogged about I can reference my online personality, Dekcuf! She’s reliable enough for the university isn’t it? If Dekcuf says it’s so – it must be so!!! He he! I know, I know! I just became so fond of the idea! Not because I would be referencing myself (although that would be sooooo cool as well), but because I also feel it demonstrates Dekcuf as her own online personality. But ofcourse – if I could just reference to this blog it would be a hell of a lot easier for me – and as you all know I am lazy!
On a side note, however, I started to seriously doubt that this murder had ever taken place! That it must have been some blogger who made the story up, because blogs were all I could find! And that has to say a lot about the web, truth, reality and time!!!

Sony Station Exchange and GMs responsabilities

25 April 2006

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So, yeah! I’m still trying to write about intellectual property rights within MMORPGs. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that reputation is a commodity in MMORPGs, both for the game developers and the gamers themselves, and I’m wondering if it is this reputation that is or should be protected within intellectual property rights! Firstly I’ve used Eriksson and Grill’s DiGRA 2005 paper “Who owns my avatar? – Rights in virtual property” for inspiration to illustrate the different interests game developers and gamers have in intellectual property rights. From their excellent paper:

“Two main interests are discernible in connection to the game producers:

  1. Subscription interest – virtual trade may decrease a game producer’s income from subscriptions. If new players buy advanced characters for real money they won’t have to spend time in the game (which they consequently would have to pay for) advancing their own avatars. The subscription interest is also affected by the fact that the game producer may get a bad reputation by letting people with more money than time buy themselves into the game, resulting in gamers leaving the virtual world
  2. Control interest – developers have an interest in remaining in control over their creation. In part, this may be a purely creative interest, quite separable from the subscription interest. Often, producers wish that their virtual world should remain a game only. The recognition of ownership rights in the virtual world of their game may thus conflict with their wish to control that world. Producers therefore try to establish norms implying that trade in virtual property with real money should not exist”

Games are the democratization of fiction!

18 April 2006

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Awwww…aren’t those words just vigorating? They’re not my own, ofcourse, it’s Tappan King who’s uttered them to Greg Costikyan. It’s so revolutionary, isn’t it?! Games are setting fiction free to the people!

“the Artist creates, the audience consumes. Games, contrariwise, allow individual players to participate in the creation of their fictional experience. The developers still shape and constrain that experience, to be sure, but there is no experience without the active engagement of the player; the player may well do something with the construct that the developers had not anticipated; and the ultimate experience is a collaboration in which both sides participate, not something handed down from On High by the Great Artiste. It is, in other words, the antithesis of aristocratic; games are a way for everyman to participate in creating his or her own narrative experience. Games are a democratic artform for a democratic age.”

But alas, I’m not ready to say that ‘play’ is fiction or that playing fiction is democratic and nonlinear. It’s just a nice and powerful notion. I suppose I fell for this completely because it is right at the core of my arguments on MMORPGs. There is a sense and a feeling of democracy, but come right down to it, it’s all an illusion. One could maybe compare it to the illusion of democracy in Iraq! Or the freedom to say whatever you want in your e-mails!

But, then again, this is not really what he’s saying either, is it? Democratization of fiction! We’re creating fictions that people can interact with. But we’re not exactly creating a collaborative art form are we? Or are we?

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